Agents
Rational Capability in Concurrent Games
Li, Yinfeng, Lorini, Emiliano, Mittelmann, Munyque
We extend concurrent game structures (CGSs) with a simple notion of preference over computations and define a minimal notion of rationality for agents based on the concept of dominance. We use this notion to interpret a CL and an ATL languages that extend the basic CL and ATL languages with modalities for rational capability, namely, a coalition's capability to rationally enforce a given property. For each of these languages, we provide results about the complexity of satisfiability checking and model checking as well as about axiomatization.
Mean-Field Bayesian Optimisation
Steinberg, Petar, Ziomek, Juliusz, Jusup, Matej, Bogunovic, Ilija
We address the problem of optimising the average payoff for a large number of cooperating agents, where the payoff function is unknown and treated as a black box. While standard Bayesian Optimisation (BO) methods struggle with the scalability required for high-dimensional input spaces, we demonstrate how leveraging the mean-field assumption on the black-box function can transform BO into an efficient and scalable solution. Specifically, we introduce MF-GP-UCB, a novel efficient algorithm designed to optimise agent payoffs in this setting. Our theoretical analysis establishes a regret bound for MF-GP-UCB that is independent of the number of agents, contrasting sharply with the exponential dependence observed when naive BO methods are applied. We evaluate our algorithm on a diverse set of tasks, including real-world problems, such as optimising the location of public bikes for a bike-sharing programme, distributing taxi fleets, and selecting refuelling ports for maritime vessels. Empirical results demonstrate that MF-GP-UCB significantly outperforms existing benchmarks, offering substantial improvements in performance and scalability, constituting a promising solution for mean-field, black-box optimisation. The code is available at https://github.com/petarsteinberg/MF-BO.
LM Agents for Coordinating Multi-User Information Gathering
Jhamtani, Harsh, Andreas, Jacob, Van Durme, Benjamin
This paper introduces PeopleJoin, a benchmark for evaluating LM-mediated collaborative problem solving. Given a user request, PeopleJoin agents must identify teammates who might be able to assist, converse with these teammates to gather information, and finally compile a useful answer or summary for the original user. PeopleJoin comprises two evaluation domains: PeopleJoin-QA, focused on questions about tabular data, and PeopleJoin-DocCreation, focused on document creation tasks. The two domains are adapted from existing NLP benchmarks for database question answering and multi-document summarization; here, however, the information needed to complete these tasks is distributed across synthetic ``organizations'' of 2--20 users, simulating natural multi-user collaboration scenarios. We implemented several popular LM agent architectures, evaluating their accuracy and efficiency at completing tasks, and highlight new research questions that can be studied using PeopleJoin.
Investigating and Extending Homans' Social Exchange Theory with Large Language Model based Agents
Wang, Lei, Zhang, Zheqing, Chen, Xu
Homans' Social Exchange Theory (SET) is widely recognized as a basic framework for understanding the formation and emergence of human civilizations and social structures. In social science, this theory is typically studied based on simple simulation experiments or real-world human studies, both of which either lack realism or are too expensive to control. In artificial intelligence, recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities in simulating human behaviors. Inspired by these insights, we adopt an interdisciplinary research perspective and propose using LLM-based agents to study Homans' SET. Specifically, we construct a virtual society composed of three LLM agents and have them engage in a social exchange game to observe their behaviors. Through extensive experiments, we found that Homans' SET is well validated in our agent society, demonstrating the consistency between the agent and human behaviors. Building on this foundation, we intentionally alter the settings of the agent society to extend the traditional Homans' SET, making it more comprehensive and detailed. To the best of our knowledge, this paper marks the first step in studying Homans' SET with LLM-based agents. More importantly, it introduces a novel and feasible research paradigm that bridges the fields of social science and computer science through LLM-based agents. Code is available at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/SET.
Assessing the impacts of tradable credit schemes through agent-based simulation
Liu, Renming, Argyros, Dimitrios, Jiang, Yu, Ben-Akiva, Moshe E., Seshadri, Ravi, Azevedo, Carlos Lima
Tradable credit schemes (TCS) have been attracting interest from the transportation research community as an appealing alternative to congestion pricing, due to the advantages of revenue neutrality and equity. Nonetheless, existing research has largely employed network and market equilibrium approaches with simplistic characterizations of transportation demand, supply, credit market operations, and market behavior. Agent- and activity-based simulation affords a natural means to comprehensively assess TCS by more realistically modeling demand, supply, and individual market interactions. We propose an integrated simulation framework for modeling a TCS, and implements it within the state-of-the-art open-source urban simulation platform SimMobility, including: (a) a flexible TCS design that considers multiple trips and explicitly accounts for individual trading behaviors; (b) a simulation framework that captures the complex interactions between a TCS regulator, the traveler, and the TCS market itself, with the flexibility to test future TCS designs and relevant mobility models; and (c) a set of simulation experiments on a large mesoscopic multimodal network combined with a Bayesian Optimization approach for TCS optimal design. The experiment results indicate network and market performance to stabilize over the day-to-day process, showing the alignment of our agent-based simulation with the known theoretical properties of TCS. We confirm the efficiency of TCS in reducing congestion under the adopted market behavioral assumptions and open the door for simulating different individual behaviors. We measure how TCS impacts differently the local network, heterogeneous users, the different travel behaviors, and how testing different TCS designs can avoid negative market trading behaviors.
Border Patrol agents to stop wearing body cameras after social media post reveals 'security risk'
Agents with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will no longer wear body cameras during field operations after a social media post publicized how to identify individual agents. "All U.S. Border Patrol Agents will cease the use of body-worn cameras (BWC) in all operational environments," CBP said in a statement to NewsNation, which originally reported the news. The directive comes after a post on Reddit claimed that the mobile application BLE Radar, which uses Bluetooth to scan for low-energy devices such as phones, smartwatches and speakers, can also track CBP body cameras from a distance of 100 yards and can also trigger improvised explosive devices. A Border Patrol agent stands on a cliff looking for migrants that crossed the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico near the city of Sasabe, Arizona. CBP officials sent out a directive following the post informing agents of a "potential security risk" while immediately pulling body cameras from use in the field.
CoDiff: Conditional Diffusion Model for Collaborative 3D Object Detection
Huang, Zhe, Wang, Shuo, Wang, Yongcai, Wang, Lei
-- Collaborative 3D object detection holds significant importance in the field of autonomous driving, as it greatly enhances the perception capabilities of each individual agent by facilitating information exchange among multiple agents. However, in practice, due to pose estimation errors and time delays, the fusion of information across agents often results in feature representations with spatial and temporal noise, leading to detection errors. Diffusion models naturally have the ability to denoise noisy samples to the ideal data, which motivates us to explore the use of diffusion models to address the noise problem between multi-agent systems. In this work, we propose CoDiff, a novel robust collaborative perception framework that leverages the potential of diffusion models to generate more comprehensive and clearer feature representations. T o the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to apply diffusion models to multi-agent collaborative perception. Specifically, we project high-dimensional feature map into the latent space of a powerful pre-trained autoencoder . Within this space, individual agent information serves as a condition to guide the diffusion model's sampling. Experimental study on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrates that the proposed framework CoDiff consistently outperforms existing relevant methods in terms of the collaborative object detection performance, and exhibits highly desired robustness when the pose and delay information of agents is with high-level noise.
HedgeAgents: A Balanced-aware Multi-agent Financial Trading System
Li, Xiangyu, Zeng, Yawen, Xing, Xiaofen, Xu, Jin, Xu, Xiangmin
As automated trading gains traction in the financial market, algorithmic investment strategies are increasingly prominent. While Large Language Models (LLMs) and Agent-based models exhibit promising potential in real-time market analysis and trading decisions, they still experience a significant -20% loss when confronted with rapid declines or frequent fluctuations, impeding their practical application. Hence, there is an imperative to explore a more robust and resilient framework. This paper introduces an innovative multi-agent system, HedgeAgents, aimed at bolstering system robustness via ``hedging'' strategies. In this well-balanced system, an array of hedging agents has been tailored, where HedgeAgents consist of a central fund manager and multiple hedging experts specializing in various financial asset classes. These agents leverage LLMs' cognitive capabilities to make decisions and coordinate through three types of conferences. Benefiting from the powerful understanding of LLMs, our HedgeAgents attained a 70% annualized return and a 400% total return over a period of 3 years. Moreover, we have observed with delight that HedgeAgents can even formulate investment experience comparable to those of human experts (https://hedgeagents.github.io/).
Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Generative AI for Query Resolution and Analysis
Rahman, Mohammad Wali Ur, Nevarez, Ric, Mim, Lamia Tasnim, Hariri, Salim
In this paper, we introduce MASQRAD (Multi-Agent Strategic Query Resolution and Diagnostic tool), a transformative framework for query resolution based on the actor-critic model, which utilizes multiple generative AI agents. MASQRAD is excellent at translating imprecise or ambiguous user inquiries into precise and actionable requests. This framework generates pertinent visualizations and responses to these focused queries, as well as thorough analyses and insightful interpretations for users. MASQRAD addresses the common shortcomings of existing solutions in domains that demand fast and precise data interpretation, such as their incapacity to successfully apply AI for generating actionable insights and their challenges with the inherent ambiguity of user queries. MASQRAD functions as a sophisticated multi-agent system but "masquerades" to users as a single AI entity, which lowers errors and enhances data interaction. This approach makes use of three primary AI agents: Actor Generative AI, Critic Generative AI, and Expert Analysis Generative AI. Each is crucial for creating, enhancing, and evaluating data interactions. The Actor AI generates Python scripts to generate data visualizations from large datasets within operational constraints, and the Critic AI rigorously refines these scripts through multi-agent debate. Finally, the Expert Analysis AI contextualizes the outcomes to aid in decision-making. With an accuracy rate of 87\% when handling tasks related to natural language visualization, MASQRAD establishes new benchmarks for automated data interpretation and showcases a noteworthy advancement that has the potential to revolutionize AI-driven applications.
A Physics-Informed Machine Learning Framework for Safe and Optimal Control of Autonomous Systems
Tayal, Manan, Singh, Aditya, Kolathaya, Shishir, Bansal, Somil
As autonomous systems become more ubiquitous in daily life, ensuring high performance with guaranteed safety is crucial. However, safety and performance could be competing objectives, which makes their co-optimization difficult. Learning-based methods, such as Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL), achieve strong performance but lack formal safety guarantees due to safety being enforced as soft constraints, limiting their use in safety-critical settings. Conversely, formal methods such as Hamilton-Jacobi (HJ) Reachability Analysis and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) provide rigorous safety assurances but often neglect performance, resulting in overly conservative controllers. To bridge this gap, we formulate the co-optimization of safety and performance as a state-constrained optimal control problem, where performance objectives are encoded via a cost function and safety requirements are imposed as state constraints. We demonstrate that the resultant value function satisfies a Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, which we approximate efficiently using a novel physics-informed machine learning framework. In addition, we introduce a conformal prediction-based verification strategy to quantify the learning errors, recovering a high-confidence safety value function, along with a probabilistic error bound on performance degradation. Through several case studies, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework in enabling scalable learning of safe and performant controllers for complex, high-dimensional autonomous systems.